agement company, foresaw the pos- sibility of building a Sim franchise. Released in 2000, The Sims was an im- mediate hit; it went on to become the best-selling P.C. game of all time. E.A. has since licensed it to many other play- ing platforms, and issues regular Sims "expansion packs," featuring new con- tent, like Livin' Large, House Party, and Hot Date. (Wright worked on The Sims 2, which was a major redesign, but he has had nothing to do with the expansion packs.) The Sims franchise has earned E.A. more than a billion dollars so far. E.A.' s only misstep was The Sims Online, the multiplayer ver- sion released in 2002, which failed to attract the masses of players drawn to other multiplayer games, such as World of War craft and Runescape. The Sims brought a huge new popu- lation to gaming-girls. That did not come as a complete surprise to Wright, since women made up forty per cent of his Sims development team, and his daughter Cassidy, then fourteen years old, had helped him tinker with the pro- totypes. When he was a kid, Wright told me, "I never played with dolls, which is more of a social thing than playing with trains-it's about the people in the house. Cassidy helped me see that. She and her friends got into the purely creative side of the game, rather than the goal-oriented side, which really influenced me a lot." Cassidy was traumatized to discover that the Sims could burn down their house, and die in the fire, if they weren't careful around the stove. Wright left that feature in the game. An unintended result of The Sims' success is that Wright transformed the tactile experience of playing with dolls, which has been a part of children's de- velopment for thousands of years, into a virtual experience. The enormous suc- cess of The Sims means that children today can grow up without having the hands-on model-making experiences that Wright enjoyed as a child, and that inspired him to make games in the first place. O ne evening, I went with Wright to the house he and Jones moved into after the Oakland Hills fire. He drove a black two-door BMW with a fancy radar detector. The car was a mess, in- side and out; Wright never washes it, because he wants it to look like one of the banged-up starships in "Star Wars." Parking it in the garage, he led me into the house through a short hallway that was full of oddly shaped pieces of ma- chined steel. Wright explained that these were left over from the days when he competed in gladiatorial robot con- tests called BattleBots, in which en- gineers attempt to build the most de- structive remote-control robot vehicles possible. These ferocious machines fight in large Plexiglas boxes, ramming into each other at high speeds, trying to disable their opponents by flipping them over; the tournaments are like geek cockfights. One ofW right's robots, which he designed with the help of Cassidy, was called Kitty Puff Puff It fought its opponents (which had names like the Eviscerator and Death Machine) by sticking a piece of gauze to its oppo- nent's armature, and then driving in cir- cles around it, until the opposing robot was so cocooned in gauze that it couldn't move. Eventually, the organizers banned cocoonIng. The house, a split-level, was on a hill- top in Orinda, and it had a lovely view of Mt. Diablo in the distance. Jones's paint- ings-colorful, biomorphic abstrac- tions-were hung on the walls, and in the yard were her sculptures: architec- tural-looking objects made of found metal. But Wright's stuff took up most of the space. Just inside the front door was the control console of a Soyuz 23 spacecraft, from the nineteen -seventies, which Wright bought from a former State Department official. Upstairs was his collection of unusual insects. Cassidy was away at college, but her prints-whimsical col- lages that feature draw- ings of rabbits and electric sockets-were also on dis- play, and I saw a comic book she made, "The Adventures of Not Asian Girl." On a porch off the living room were large blocks of alabaster that Wright was in the process of sculpting with hand tools into smooth, Brancusi-like shapes, a hobby that Jones had suggested to her husband as a way of expressing his artis- tic side. The rock dust and overflowing ashtrays on the porch suggested that he had been devoting a considerable amount of time to grinding stone lately. The house was also filled with books. Some are what Wright calls "land- marks" -foundations for the design of one or another of his games. "Most of the games I've done were inspired by books," he told me. SimEarth, a simu- lation of the earth's ecology, was based on the Gaia hypothesis of James Love- lock, and SimAnt, an ant-colony simu- lation, was based on E. O. Wilson's "The Ants." The key landmarks for Spore, however, were not books. They were Drake's equation and "The Pow- ers ofTen." The former, which he'd shown me on the computer screen in his office, is a formula devised in 1961 by Frank Drake, a radio astronomer, to estimate the number of possible worlds in our galaxy that might be populated with beings that could communicate with us. (About ten thousand, accord- ing to Drake's calculations.) The latter is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, made in 1977, which begins with a man lying on the grass in a Chi- cago park, and then shows a series of images of the same shot, each taken from a position ten times farther away than the last one, until the viewer reaches the limits of the universe at 10 24 meters (ten to the twenty-fourth power). Then it returns to the opening image and goes the other way, woming into the man's skin, until at 10- 16 you reach the limits of the inner world-the space inside a proton. "I love 'The Powers ofTen,'" Wright said, "and I've always been a big fan of the Eameses. At the same time, I am really interested in the terms of Drake's equa- tion, and when I began working on Spore I was using it to map some of the game play. At some point I realized that the terms of Drake's equation mapped neady to the scale of 'The Powers ofTen.' So I rolled the two up into S " pore. Wright seems to be more interested in making games than he is in integrat- ing his ideas into a coherent philosophy. After you have played The Sims long enough, for example, you begin to recog- nize all the ways in which the simulation is not like real life. (The Sims 2, which came out in 2004, added more refine- ments to the basic design; in addition to the motives and needs, there are four THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 6, 2006 97